The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Unable to find white suits large enough to fit Chuck McCann, costumers had him wear old suits previously worn by studio character actor Sydney Greenstreet.

Film debut of Chuck McCann.

To conceal her age, Sondra Locke falsified her birth year more times than such notorieties as Joan Crawford, Mae West or Zsa Zsa Gabor. When Heart was being made in 1967, the late actress (born Sandra Smith in May 1944) was 23 years old, but an international press release said she was 17. Nashville Tennessean theater critic Clara Hieronymus called her out on the lie almost right away, but it took decades for the mass media to catch on. At the time of the movie's 1968 premiere, Locke claimed to be 21 but was in fact 24. While promoting The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) eight years later, the then 32-year-old gave her age as 20. Various news outlets wrongly reported Locke as being 29 in 1978 (when she was 34); 26 in 1979 (35 then); and 30 in 1980 (actually 36). Her real age was finally confirmed by her maternal half-brother, Donald Locke, in an exclusive interview with The Tennessean in 1989. Sondra Locke was 45 in 1989, but her publicist claimed 42. Locke never came clean about her age, even lying about it in her autobiography, and she refused to back down despite the proliferation of fact-checking during her final years. In a 2015 podcast interview, the then 71-year-old lied that she "was just graduating high school" when she started work on this film. Locke graduated high school in May 1962 at age 18 - more than five years before she was cast in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

George Peppard was sent the script by Warner Bros. but his agent talked him out of it, telling him that the part of Singer, a deaf mute, was too weak and "might be a homosexual."

Appearing at the foot of the main street of Singer's new city (actually Broad Street in Selma, Alabama, USA), is the Edmund Pettus Bridge, made famous by a series of voting rights marches in 1965 in which marchers attempted to cross the bridge on the way from Selma to Montgomery. The violent reaction at the bridge to the peaceful march made national headlines. The movie was filmed here only about two years after this event.